Amiga: OS5 better than Mac OS X

updated 08:30 pm EDT, Mon October 8, 2007

by MacNN Staff

Amiga CEO on OS5, Mac OS X

Amiga CEO Bill McEwen has declared that his company's OS5 will be better than Mac OS X, insisting that the forthcoming operating system has much to offer while refusing to give any details. Amiga's OS5 is well underway, according to McEwen, who promised to serve up a press release before the end of 2007 offering details on Amiga's secret project. "Details for OS 5 will be made public in the fourth quarter of 2007, and then you will have a much clearer understanding and I will let you decide if what I know to be true is accurate," the executive said. OS5 is said to scale to its host hardware, allowing the system software to run on anything from mobile phones to consoles and servers. Amiga is currently fighting a legal battle over OS4, but McEwen said OS5 is ahead of schedule as he reiterated forthcoming announcements in the fourth quarter of this year.

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glad to see everyone ignored this article. As a long time Amigan.... let me say, that, this is what I'd call a hobbyist company, its not clear if they have offices or employees, or they are running things from their bedrooms...they cartainly don't generally release the products they claim they are going to release. I regard announcements from these guys as being little more than geeks trying to garner some attention.

They did once release an SDK, it was mostly a repackaged IDE from another company...but its not out of the realm of possibility, that someone would use the famous name to release something...but highly unlikely nevertheless.

As great as the Amiga was there is simply no longer a need for it. Let's face it, we can now do with brute force what the 16-bit Amiga (and Atari) computers did with brilliant design and finesse. It is too bad that we had to wait almost 20 years for Mac and Windows computers to catch up to the capabilities of the Amiga and Atari, but neither of those systems is any longer necessary since we now have the sheer power to create excellent and fast computing experiences without the necessity of efficient operating systems and software, or brilliant programmers squeezing every last bit of speed possible out of their wonderful machines. It was a great era, and I can only imagine how much further advanced the computing world would be if they had succeeded and the Mac and PC failed instead, but there is no way a new Amiga system could possibly perform the leap-frog suggested. It might be good, but it would have to be 20 years ahead again to gain any true interest, and I don't see that happening.

I sold my A1200 6 months ago for $150 Aus. Just think, I could have been running OS 5 on a PPC 603e processor and no graphics card. Oh the joys.

As was mentioned before. A beautiful system in its day. My A1200 still booted quicker and did the simple things quicker than XP. But they were a machine of the time. Much of their brilliance was the fact of their custom chip sets and the fact that the OS was tightly tied to it. Those days are gone.

Being an early Amiga adopter with the A1000. The Amiga had more than just great graphics, it had true hardware multi-tasking, when a game crashed the audio would still-be playing, and the Sprites would still be moving, no other commercial system that I was aware of had such design. In many was it was way ahead of any Windows, Mac, or Atari ST. However, Commodore was a disorganized company and the Amiga OS as a result sucked. Commodore was confused about their direction as a company, they could not decide wether to be DOS compatible, a games machine, a graphics machine, etc.
Apple on the other-hand was much more organized, they developed computers for the graphics professionals, awesome software, they had networking (Apple-Talk), and they had the best office printer out there, the Laserwriter. But as we all know Apple sucked at games, you could not begin to imaging Marble-Madness on a Mac but on the Amiga it was insane!

I'd love the idea of at utterly new operating system, neither Windows or Unix based, but something created from the ground up, which even OS X wasn't.

But the thing is, virtually no one - except geeks like ourselves - but Macs because of the operating system. As PC owners often say 'it's about applications' - and the turning point for OS X was when, all of a sudden, there will killer apps that were Mac only. (For me it was looking at Keynote and the Omni apps, for consumers it's often iLife).

So a new Amiga OS is irrelevant without applications for it. And if they are just recompiled Linux/Unix apps, then . . well who cares.

Having read through the link, the following is interesting, as it implies that it will run on TOP of a native OS, which suggests something more like NextStep (i.e. an application environment rather than an operating system).

"Details for OS 5 will be made public in the fourth quarter of 2007, and then you will have a much clearer understanding and I will let you decide if what I know to be true is accurate,"

These statements give me great confidence as a consumer. Yeppers. I have the warm and fuzzies.

I think Bill McEwen should use the song "Eye of the TIger" at his big release on these mind blowing details in the fourth quarter. That is if Motel Six's Conference room supports audio/visual for his press release.

:-)

Was a great machine eons ago. But just a mark in History, not current events.

The computers had a market niche, at the time they were released. But Atari ran on GEM, which was a very quick port of the Digital Research product...and TOS, a basic operating system.

Amiga with true mult-tasking (much to the confusion of game developers who often by-passed the os and hit the hardware directly)...was ahead of its time.

But as others have stated, being ahead of its time via the use of custom chipsets, made it hard to keep up with a commodity industry that soon passed it on every front.

But, anyway, enough of history...Commodore got its fame from mostly the Commodore 64. The Commodore Amiga wasn't compatible at all with the 64...3rd parties eventually wrote emulators, but thats it.

By the same token, what would have been nice, was a Commodore that released the successor to the Amiga, not compatible at all with the Amiga... just another 'home computer' that was up to snuff with the new tech in computer (such as memory protection, etc.).

But even this OS4 they are fighting over...don't let the fight fool you, they are fighting over junk.

I'm an Amiga fan, and I don't believe this claim. Look through comments in response to more recent McEwen open letters and Q&As. It appears that the majority of the small remaining Amiga users/fans feel he's full of c*** and wish he'd go away.

In the 8 bit computer world, the Atari 400/800/XL/XE systems were the best. Awesome graphics (and killer app Star Raiders). Apple II and Commodore 64 couldn't touch them. Then through a twist of fate, Atari "became" Commodore, and Commodore "became" Atari. The guys who came up with all the custom chips behind the "awesomness" of the Atari 400/800/XL/XE chips moved to Commodore and bore the Amiga. And Jack Tramiel, head of Commodore, up and left and bought Atari and came out with the ST line. Amiga had the sexiness. The ST was nice as well -- I used one with Notator by C-Labs (now part of Apple and Logic/Logic Pro) but the Commodore Amiga gained the cool and s*** crown from Atari.

Seems like a lot of kids here have no clue about the IIGS, which had an OS much more developed in terms of features and miles ahead of the Amiga yet much closer to a modern Mac OS, as well as sound capabilities that put the Amiga at the bottom of the pit.

Workbench was simply a c***, and only those who used it know it. Great machine for games and a few graph apps...that's all.

now that's funny. The IIGS was a total and complete failure and was simply inspired by the pure awesomeness that was the Amiga. The 1040ST was vastly superior to the IIGS. The IIGS had nice audio - but so did the Amiga (and did it first). The computers with audio at the 'bottom of the pit' are all the other ones in Apple's lineup.

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